Bluetooth 5 Bringing Double Range, Quadruple Speed

Bluetooth 5 is set to make its formal debut June 16 at the Discover Blue media event in London, reported the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). The wireless standard is getting a major upgrade from Bluetooth 4.2.

The newest version of Bluetooth will pack twice the speed, and four times the range, of existing low-energy Bluetooth transmissions, as indicated in a statement from Mark Powell, executive director of Bluetooth SIG. The organization is made up of 27,500 member companies, which work together through it and guide innovation for Bluetooth technology.

Technical improvements in Bluetooth 5 include new functionality for connectionless services, such as navigation and location-specific information.

"By adding significantly more capacity to advertising transmissions, Bluetooth 5 will further propel the adoption and deployment of beacons and location-based services to users around the world," Powell explained in the statement.

BT spec was a big monster from very beginning, they did not really know what they gonna use it for, so they introduced a huge number of profiles, of witch only two have survived to this day: -SCO/ESCO ( your phone voice link) and -A2DP (your headset stereo headphones), the Serial Port profile is also used, yes, but it its not widely spread.

This is too bad. Bluetooth works well at the moment. Now it will be "improved" just like Wifi to try to impress someone (don't know who) about a blazing speed with an error rate that makes it as effective as the last standard....see WiFi N at 5.8Ghz. Improvements have been made but there are fundamental laws of physics. You want the best range - go lower frequency. You want the highest datarate, go high frequency. Opposing requirements are what engineering tradeoffs are all about - no magic.

I saw several news source says "Quadriple speed, Double range" while others say "Double speed, Quadriple range". If "Quadriple speed" is true as message from Mark Powell says, I wonder what magic they applied. They already archieved "Triple speed" back in Bluetooth 2.0, using 8-PSK modulation (3bits/symbol) instead of Bipolar GFSK (1bit/symbol). Sure there are more high-density modulation schemes known (16QAM 4bit/symbol for example) but it requires much complex to process and will result more power consumption.